Марксизм гуманитариев: Пушкинистика во второй половине 1930-х годов

Abstract

This paper discusses the cult of Pushkin, which was officially developed in Stalin's Russia. If many publications of that time are pure propaganda, some of them, due mainly to the “academical Pushkinists” (Tomashevskii, Bondi, Tsiavlovskii, Vinokur etc.), are worth reading. However, even the most serious works could not escape a touch of Marxism. As an example, ‘Pushkin's Historicism’, which appeared precisely in the mid-1930s and supposed a sense of history as a result of laws and social antagonism (in the way of the new romantic historicism), could appear as the product of some ideological distortion, as Aleksandr Dolinin truly pointed it. Nevertheless, Pushkin as an historian was before largely misestimated, so the Stalin cult of Pushkin is not merely a comeback to the imperial past. In that sense, the article deals with the debate arising from David Hoffmann's book, Stalinist values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity 1917–1941 (2003), about Nicholas Timasheff's work, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (1946).